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Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time

stavros.io

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Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time

#31

Post by dagurp »

> Spammers will usually realize they’re talking to a bot (or at least to someone who isn’t interested or not going to give them any money) after around 3-5 messages, but some have sent up to 15 messages before giving up in frustration.

So it passed the Turing test?

Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time

#32

Post by cryptarch »

StavrosK wrote: post #6
joelthelion wrote: post #2

Really cool. Two remarks: 1) If lots of people start using this, spammers might learn to avoid wasting time with Mnesty's CEO. Having a few more fake companies would help. 2) The bot could probably be made a lot smarter with some natural language processing. But it seems to fill its purpose pretty well already. I think this just shows how desperate for leads spammers are.

1) Yeah, there's support for multiple domains, but I have no domains right now :) If anyone wants to donate one, please open an issue! 2) Exactly, they're so desperate for leads that they will spend lots of time chasing someone who doesn't appear to make lots of sense.

I have a few domains you could borrow? I can at the least offer you 5 domains for half a year, shoot me an email if you're interested.

Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time

#33

Post by StavrosK »

dagurp wrote: post #31

> Spammers will usually realize they’re talking to a bot (or at least to someone who isn’t interested or not going to give them any money) after around 3-5 messages, but some have sent up to 15 messages before giving up in frustration. So it passed the Turing test?

No, the Turing test requires that the interviewer not be trying to extract money from the interviewees :P

Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time

#34

Post by StavrosK »

djhworld wrote: post #30

How is the bot tailoring the replies, for example > Hello, I have wired the funds you asked for. Could we please proceed to the next stage? Daniel Wong CEO, MNesty, LLC Is that a canned response? This happens later on in the thread (does it recognise that the topic of the conversation is "funds" rather than say "product")

It has various categories of replies, which right now you can specify when you forward a message (it sends you a management URL back). Later on, when I have enough data, I'll do some simple ML to have it pick a most likely category as a default.

Each category comes with its own set of responses, but you can see where the category changed because the bot will start talking about a product and then switch to talking about funds.

The code is here if you want to see:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/Spamnesty/

Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time

#36

Post by Fjolsvith »

return0 wrote: post #3

I usually just pretend that i just killed someone to get the money they asked for.

Lol. I used to bait spammers as a hobby, and after a few exchanges with one, I'd tell them how lucky I was that I had been identified as the real owner of $324 million in a lost government account. That I had to have been the luckiest person in the world, because not only that, just last week, I won the national Nigerian lottery, and the week before that, a distant great-aunt from Nigeria had named me sole heir in her will!

Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time

#39

Post by StavrosK »

cryptarch wrote: post #32
StavrosK wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Yeah, there's support for multiple domains, but I have no domains right now :) If anyone wants to donate one, please open an issue! 2) Exactly, they're so desperate for leads that they will spend lots of time chasing someone who doesn't appear to make lots of sense.

I have a few domains you could borrow? I can at the least offer you 5 domains for half a year, shoot me an email if you're interested.

Will do, thank you! I need to get the process ironed out with a second domain first, then I'll contact you.
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